The double movement and the triple-helix: Divestment, decommodification, and the Dakota Access Pipeline

Leah S Horowitz

Environment and Planning A, 2023, vol. 55, issue 6, 1337-1354

Abstract: This paper investigates divestment movements’ attempts to influence investment decisions. I use the example of #DefundDAPL, which targeted private-sector funding of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), an oil conduit crossing the Missouri River a half-mile from the Standing Rock Reservation. I analyze activists’ engagements with banks as a manifestation of Karl Polanyi's second movement, that is, resistance to environmental destruction and human rights violations that accompany “commodification†(the subordination of social relations to the economy). I identify divestment as a “withdrawing†type of decommodification that restrains free-market dominance by defunding environmentally and socially destructive projects. Next, I explore how investment practices can be analyzed as a “triple-helix†comprised of three intertwined strands—ideologies, power dynamics, and private-sector policies—that pull one another toward commodification and/or decommodification as they coproduce each other in dynamic tension, creating a constantly evolving investment environment. Applying this framework to #DefundDAPL, I examine how activists’ success in mobilizing societal ideologies to paint DAPL as an unethical investment was informed by banks’ concerns about project profitability as well as by place-based conditions and relationships between banks and pipeline companies. Further, I find that private-sector policy changes in response to the DAPL controversy were prompted by evolving societal ideologies yet constrained by interbank power relations. In conclusion, I argue that a triple-helix lens helps unpack the black box of decommodification by revealing complex interactions among ideologies, power relations, and policy-making and demonstrates limits to private-sector initiatives’ ability to impose adequate restrictions on environmentally and socially harmful investment practices.

Keywords: Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL); Environment; Social; and Governance (ESG) investing; environmental social movements; indigenous rights; socially responsible investment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:55:y:2023:i:6:p:1337-1354

DOI: 10.1177/0308518X221147299

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